


Sublime Madness of the Soul

by KChan88



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:09:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6228706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KChan88/pseuds/KChan88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras and Combeferre talk on the evening before General Lamarque's funeral. They talk of revolution and death and love, standing together in the face of what they know might be their last few days, hope resting in their souls for the future. </p>
<p>I wrote this for Barricade Day 2015 and realized that I posted it on Tumblr but never here!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sublime Madness of the Soul

The sky was bleeding already.

Enjolras stands by the open window in the back room of the Corinthe, hand resting on the ledge as he looks out. The sun sinks lower, casting shadows streaked with gold across the rooftops of Paris, red streaking the sky and dripping down at the edges, the mixture turning the sky a shade of burnt orange. There is a hush before him and a silence behind him until he hears footsteps cracking through it, determined but decidedly friendly. He feels Combeferre’s presence beside him before he even looks over, and when he does, the sight of his dear friend’s face stills his trembling heart.

“Has everyone gone home?”

“Yes. Well, except Courfeyrac. He’s asleep in the corner over there,” Combeferre says, turning his head a moment, a smile fading onto his lips. “In fact I just sent Feuilly home, though it took some doing. He’ll meet us in the morning.”

Enjolras turns, smiling when he sees Courfeyrac at his favorite table in the corner, head resting on his arms, one of his hands outstretched so that the tips of his fingers graze the edge of his hat, the cockade on his jacket crinkling against the table. Enjolras feels something warm move from the pit of his stomach up to the center of his chest, spreading everywhere as if the warmth of the sun outside has taken root in his soul.

“What is it?” Combeferre asks, surveying him, voice soft with unquestioned affection.

“I,” Enjolras begins, eyes lingering on Courfeyrac for a moment before they trail across the room and outside once more to the dying sun and then back to Combeferre, who waits patiently. “I just…” Enjolras feels his words tangle together for all the emotion they’re wrapped in, and he’s not used to having such trouble articulating himself, especially not to Combeferre. He breathes in, unable to name all the emotions passing through him for how they meld and twist together, forming something new with each moment. “I only care about all of you. More than I can say. I…the love between us all is not something I think I could do without. It is the only thing that matters to me as much as our work.”

Enjolras clears his throat, blinking a few times, and Combeferre gives him the moment, understanding passing between them, almost tangible.

“I know,” Combeferre finally says, folding one of his hands over the one of Enjolras’ resting on the ledge.  “We all know, Enjolras.”

Enjolras smiles at the reassurance, feeling the warmth push against his chest with such force he feels as if it will burst out of him. He looks out the window again, sees people milling around the street, but he cannot hear the voices floating up as he normally might from this position. Instead all he hears are pieces of whispers that he cannot string together as everyone lays in wait for Lamarque’s funeral tomorrow, rebellion rising from the earth in hazy waves of smoke. He turns back around to Combeferre, who waits.

“Everything is ready?”

“Yes,” Combeferre says, leaning against the wall. “We have the arms we’ll need. We have everything.” He pauses. “You are certain there will be an uprising tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Enjolras says. “I have no way of knowing how large. I have no way of knowing if we will win or lose. There are whispers and rumors and certainty in the Fauborg-St. Antoine. Bossuet told me he saw people arming themselves. The air feels heavy, drenched with grief, and yet electric with something else entirely.”

“Hope,” Combeferre says simply, and Enjolras thinks he hears the echoes of human progress in his friend’s voice, the cries of the people saying _we can do better. We deserve better_. “Desperate, furious hope.”

Silence again. Thoughts threading themselves through and whisking off into the darkening sky that will inevitably lighten with the sunrise hours from now. Enjolras feels the familiar anger bubble up, the fury that runs through his veins like fire then turns to ice. He hears people talk of the Revolution with disdain, hears them speak of its violence, but how could that be more violent than centuries of oppression by those in power? How can that be more violent than starvation and poverty and people who can’t afford medicine in a cholera epidemic? Until that violence ends, how can they answer without using the same? What other language would they understand? He wished them to be violent. He wished them to be violent now so that one day, out of the old world and into the new, they could leave behind that necessity and fill the hole with people’s voices, fill it with love and a new dawn. To leave the next century happy. He has put away a part of himself in preparation for this day, for this moment, and he is ready to be the leader this barricade requires. He does not take the honor his friends bestowed on him lightly. He couldn’t.

“We have to do this,” Enjolras says, turning back to Combeferre, hearing the crackling intensity in his own voice. “We cannot stand by and watch our country, watch the people who make it up crumble even more in front of us.”

“No,” Combeferre says, grave. “We cannot.”

“I know this is not what you wanted,” Enjolras says, squeezing Combeferre’s fingers. “This thing that is nothing less than a war.”

_The good must be innocent_ , Enjolras hears Combeferre say inside his head, a memory from years ago repeated through time.

“No,” Combeferre says, and there is a melancholy running through his voice. “But I understand we have no choice right now. I understand the necessity. I only wish it weren’t so. But I can’t change the fact that it is. And I cannot ignore that duty because it is not what I wished, or because it is not my natural inclination. There will be no room for what I dream of if we cannot achieve what we aim for.”

Enjolras looks Combeferre directly in the eyes, and Combeferre looks back, connected in this shared cause through different approaches, shades of one another.

“We might not live to see that world we speak of,” Enjolras says. “We might not live to see next week.”

_Are you certain you are willing to risk that?_ Is what he doesn’t say, but from the look in Combeferre’s eyes he knows that what he means.

“You have to know that I will share your fate,” Combeferre says, and now he’s leaning on the window ledge with Enjolras as the stars appears against the velvet black above them. “You have to know that I, that all of us, are as dedicated to this as you. That your place as our chief is something we all wanted. You did not lure us here under false pretenses, my friend. As Joly has said, we have sworn to go through fire. Together.”

“I do know,” Enjolras says. “And I would never doubt that. I would never doubt you. Not any of you. I simply…I do not want to see you fall.”

Enjolras clears his throat again and feels the wetness gather in his eyes. Combeferre moves closer, their sides pressed together as their elbows rest on the ledge.

“Nor I you,” Combeferre says, voice shaking just enough to hear. “I don’t like to imagine it.”

“I don’t want the world to miss the gifts you have to offer,” Enjolras says.

“And I don’t want them to miss yours,” Combeferre responds immediately.

Enjolras shakes his head. “I am meant for war, I think. I have always known it, somehow. Perhaps that is my gift. To lead through the battle.”

“Perhaps you are meant for war, my friend,” he says, looping one arm through Enjolras’ now. “But it does not mean you are not meant to see the outcome of the war you fight. To see the victory. I want you to promise me you understand that.”

Combeferre meets his eyes again and won’t let go. Completed and corrected even now at the possible end.

“I do not seek martyrdom,” Enjolras says. “I only am willing to offer my life if necessary as the rest of you are, as protest. I understand you, my friend. I promise.”

“Perhaps all of us are meant for war, in our way. It is the product of the world we live in. As you might say, the necessity of what we must do. But we will fight to change that for the generations to come.”

“Yes,” Enjolras says, grasping the material of Combeferre’s sleeve. “Yes. We will change things, even if we do not see it, whether we see the end of the barricade or no. But we will pass on the torch, if it does not come in our lifetime. If it does not come tomorrow and we perish. Our ideals do not perish with us. I do not even know what to call what I’m feeling, at present, what to call this essence that draws us together. All of our friends. All of those who came before us and who will come after.”

“A sublime madness of the soul, perhaps?” Combeferre says. “We are nothing less than mad to challenge what we are. But perhaps that’s what it takes.”

“Seeing beyond the veil of what we’ve been told to accept,” Enjolras agrees. “And once you see how things could be as opposed to how they are, you cannot return. Possessed by these ideas as if they were there before we knew what to call them. Before we knew they existed.”

Combeferre doesn’t answer, because there’s no need for him to. Everything is understood as their hands clasp together, united in purpose. And out of the window, beyond somewhere they cannot see, in a future that has not yet come to pass, they hear the voices of victory ring out, the voices of hope and love and faith in something better. Death might come for them tomorrow or it might come the next day. It might come years from now. But those voices, that faith, that certainty in change won by nothing less than sacrifice, by nothing less than a battle of souls, that will never die, and it carries them forward with courage into the night. And toward the sunrise.


End file.
